Infidel Info

Scots awa' with parochiaid. Almost half of Scots, including nearly a third of Roman Catholics, believe state-funded Catholic schools in Scotland should be abolished. Source: The Herald [UK], Jan. 13, 2003Religious broadcasters eat up airwaves. Religious broadcasters are eating up most noncommercial stations when they come on the market. Rev. Don Wildmon's American Family Radio Wildmon owns 194 stations, has 18 affiliates and hundreds of applications pending with the FCC, compared to National Public Radio's 273 member organizations. Federal law permits noncommercial broadcasters with licenses for full-power stations to push out those with weaker signals. Source: New York Times, Sept. 2002Thou shalt cheat? Students at private religious high schools are more apt to cheat on a test than those at other schools, according to "Report Card 2002: The Ethics of American Youth" by the Josephson Institute for Ethics. The survey found 78% of students at religious schools said they had cheated at least once on exams in the last year, compared with 72% of students at other schools. Source: Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 26, 2002Suffer the children. More than 200 U.S. children have died in the past 15 years because parents used faith healing instead of medical care. Seth Asser, M.D., published a study in Pediatrics in 1998 of 172 child deaths, showing that 140 fatalities were for conditions with survival rates exceeding 90% with medical care. Source: George Street Journal, Brown University, April 12, 2002Fruits of patriarchal religion. Global violence against women is linked to women's inferior status worldwide. Violence accounts for 7% of deaths among girls and women. Between 10% and 69% of women worldwide report having been physically or sexually assaulted by a male partner (22% of U.S. women report physical abuse). As many as one-third of girls are forced into their first sexual experience. In Tanzania, 500 elderly women a year are killed for being "witches." Source: Oct. 2, 2002 World Health Organization ReportMuslim wife murders. More than 4,000 women have been doused in kerosene and set on fire by family members in Islamabad, Pakistan, in the last 8 years. Reasons include failure to produce a son, or husbands saving money when procuring a second wife. There are no burn centers in Pakistan, whose population is 96% Muslim. Source: Women's E-News, Oct. 27, 2002Suffer the Third World women. Bush's decision to withhold $34 million in funding to the UN Population Fund to placate a small religion-based antiabortion group has dire consequences. Two million women a year worldwide suffer unnecessarily from correctable obstetric fistula after childbirth (causing urinary and bowel incontinence and making them outcasts). Half of all women in poor countries give birth without trained attendants; 60% receive no care after birth, 35% get no prenatal care. About 300 million women worldwide lack access to contraception. Sources: San Antonio Express-News June 2, 2002; Kaiser Reproductive Report, Sept. 23, 2002Arab stagnation? The whole Arab world translates only about 330 books annually, according to the United Nations' Arab Human Development Report 2002, which warns that Arab societies are being crippled by lack of political and intellectual freedom, the suppression of women and cultural stagnation. Source: New York Times, July 2, 2002